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Two weeks after a fake social media post doctored to pose as surfaced on Facebook and Instagram, another fake post by the same account was shared on Sunday.
Despite multiple official complaints by Dawn.com to Facebook, the first fake post — shared on Facebook and Instagram pages ‘Defensive Offence’ on April 21 — remains in circulation on the latter till the filing of this report.
The disinformation campaign attempted to mislead the public by suggesting that Army Chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa had been “possibly infected” with Covid-19 and falsely claimed that he was under self-quarantine.
The same page ‘Defensive Offence’ on Sunday shared another post that uses the Dawn logo and copies elements of the layout of Dawn.com’s social media posts, and attempts to malign the army.
The post — which features a picture of Arif Wazir, a leader of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement who died in Islamabad on Saturday after being seriously injured in a gun attack — reads: ‘Pakistan Army Accused of Killing Arif Wazir’.
Dawn.com has once again reached out to Facebook to register its complaint against the fake post shared on April 21 — and has yet to be removed from Instagram — as well as the one shared on May 3, which is in circulation on both platforms. It also pointed out that this was an obvious violation of Facebook’s stand on misinformation, asking that the tech giant take prompt action on this and the account be taken down immediately.
Read: Fake Facebook post posing as Dawn.com attempts to mislead public
Past attempts
This is not the first attempt to mislead the public by circulating fake news using the Dawn brand.
In October 2018, a fake screenshot doctored to pose as a Dawn.com news article attempted to mislead the public by suggesting that PML-N leader Maryam Nawaz was expecting and falsely claimed that “Dawn news” had obtained her medical reports.
Earlier in August that year, another screenshot of a fake news story falsified to look like an article on Dawn.com had surfaced on social media, in an attempt to mislead the public by implying that Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf leader Faisal Vawda had withdrawn a petition against the alleged corruption of Karachi mayor Wasim Akhtar.
In a similar occurrence, in June 2018, a fake Facebook post screenshot doctored to pose as Dawn.com was shared on social media. It attempted to misinform the public and stakeholders by suggesting that Afghanistan had accepted the Durand Line as an official border.
The doctored image had led to the Afghan National Security Council (NSC) issuing a press release that mistakenly assumed the post was legitimate.